Song, by Toad

Part 1: 1-10
Part 2: 11-23
Part 3: 24-36
Part 4: 37-50

The next installment of late year list-o-rama brings us up to date with the first half of the Toad Festive Fifty. Slightly more, in fact, because I’m gearing up for a top ten, so I’ve cheated slightly on numbers here are there. For those of you who want to make your own lists, see this post for the rules, and get stuck in. The more who take part the better.

One of the things that struck me with this part of the list is the inclusion of a song from the Broken Records Toad Session. Basically, Broken Records would be all over this list, apart from the fact that they were all over last year’s list, as submitted to the Contrast Podcast, and all the songs they released this year are songs I knew from last year. So instead of where they belong, on this year’s list, they are on last year’s list. Later on there are also songs by bands which were released last year, I’m pretty sure, it’s just that I only discovered them this year.

So as well as not being in rigid Order of Toadly Merit they aren’t even in accurate chronological order either. Ah well. You’ll live. Read the rest of this entry »

Hannah from Modernaire rather kindly sent through this George Orwell essay which I rather like, especially the bit about the Toad (I assure you there is no such thing as a ‘common’ Toad, whatever George may think).

Maybe we should all step away from these pernicious computer machines, and go and lark about, carefree in the springtime lushness.

The excerpt was from ‘SomeThoughts on the Common Toad’ and whilst I object to his scurrilous accusations of lower class toadery which, as a species, we vigorously refute, it makes a nice read. Orwell may have been a stodgy novellist, by which I mean that his intellectual achievements as a writer outsrip the actual enjoyment of reading his fiction, but he was a truly excellent essayist. Anyone who is yet to read “The Decline of the English Murder” should do so immediately. But this is not really a literary site, so let’s leave it to George, shall we:

“Is it wicked to take a pleasure in Spring and other seasonal changes? To put it more precisely, is it politically reprehensible, while we are all groaning, or at any rate ought to be groaning, under the shackles of the capitalist system, to point out that life is frequently more worth living because of a blackbird’s song, a yellow elm tree in October, or some other natural phenom¬enon which does not cost money and does not have what the editors of Left-wing newspapers call a class angle? There is no doubt that many people think so… People, so the thought runs, ought to be discontented, and it is our job to multiply our wants and not simply to increase our enjoyment of the things we have already. The other idea is that this is the age of machines and that to dislike the machine, or even to want to limit its domination, is backward-looking, reactionary and slightly ridiculous.

I have always suspected that if our economic and political problems are ever really solved, life will become simpler instead of more complex, and that the sort of pleasure one gets from finding the first primrose will loom larger than the sort of pleasure one gets from eating an ice to the tune of a Wurlitzer. I think that by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and – to return to my first instance – toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable, and that by preaching the doctrine that nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one merely makes it a little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus energy except in hatred and leader-worship.”

There’s not a lot of music related to Orwell that I can think of, although I assume there must be loads out there. Animal Farm and 1984 have entered into the popular imagination such that people use metaphors from these books all the time, even if they have no idea where they came from.

For Animal Farm (tenuous, these two):
Cocorosie – Animals
The Beatles – Piggies
For 1984:
Alanalda – There is Always Someone Watching
Tina Turner – 1984
David Bowie – 1984 (Live)
For Down and Out in Paris and London:
The Divine Comedy – In and Out in Paris and London
There must be some more though, surely? Help me out here people.

Ruth (Chestie La Rue – what’s not to love about a name like that) from Modernaire has replied to my rambling nonsense about copyright and freebies, although she did so in a comment, so I thought I’d move it up here for your perusal:

Hello all. It’s Ruth here from Modernaire and The Moulettes. Sorry for the delay in responding but we’ve been touring and driving a lot and today is the first proper bit of time I’ve had to get something written down. I apologise for my clumsy way with words but I’m extremely tired and verging on mid-tour tonsilitis.

As Matthew explained earlier, the problem was in fact just with one song and one particular site (the Kruger website). In fact all of us love blogs and bloggers. To be honest Hannah and I aren’t particularly technically minded but we still browse blogs from time to time to find out about new and exciting things. I know that you were expecting us to come back with an adversarial response but really we completely support the use of our songs by people on the blogs. After all, it’s about the music and it virtually pointless to write about music if it can’t be simply heard. I honestly do not believe that blogs are taking money from our pockets, if anything they are helping a huge amount. So many people have discovered us through blogs and then gone on to come to gigs and buy cds. This may be a vast generalisation but I would say that the people who are interested enough in music to spend their time discussing music in fora such as these are the kind of people who go out and buy/see the music too. For small bands like us gigs are the biggest potential sources of income and without internet hype nobody would be booking bands outside their local area.

There’s one small thing that would possibly cause a little resentment but I don’t think blogs generally do this. If you were to put up a band’s songs for download without their permission I think that would be a bit cheeky. Essentially a band’s material is theirs to do what they like with but if other people want to talk about it, play it to their friends and even give it to their friends then that is fine as long as we don’t forget to support the music scene in a physical as well as a virtual manner by going to gigs and buying the music too

I just think it’s such a shame to see talented musicians, such as Hannah, wasting their potential creative time working in crap jobs to pay the bills. I could slip into a little rant now about the evils of greedy promoters (they’re the guilty ones not the music fans) but I won’t because i don’t have time, got to get ready to play the sold out Astoria this evening!

Hmm. A few things to think about there, if you ask me, as well as thanking Ruth for taking the time to write back. I really do appreciate it.

Firstly, I don’t always ask permission to post things. In fact, I rarely do. I know blogs that do but I, erm, am just too lazy I suppose. It would be a nightmare and would rub out the spontaneity of the things I write here. That’s not a justification exactly, nor an excuse, more of an admission of culpability I suppose.

Secondly, I have some doubts about the following statement: “Essentially a band’s material is theirs to do what they like with”. I know it makes sense on the face of it, but I am not sure if it’s true. Culture is a shared enterprise and, as Campfires & Battlefields has eloquently pointed out on this site before, once you release things into the world you kind of relinquish ownership and spill it into the sea of things that we share between us. I know it sounds crazy to say that someone’s artistic output is not entirely their own, but art of all kinds is an interaction, not something that is merely delivered to you and I think that once you put it out into the world you do have to surrender a degree of ownership. I am not sure how much ownership you have to surrender – I am still thinking about that one – but I don’t know if you can claim anything to be entirely ‘yours’ once you ask other people to listen to it. That doesn’t change the fact that failing to get permission to post people’s songs is not entirely okay, of course.

The most crucial point, actually, is the last one. You can make a justifiable argument for giving anything and everything away for free. Take this site for example: I give it all away. The writing, the sessions, the podcasts, all of it. Given the effort, what do I get to charge for? I really don’t know. For musicians it’s similar. They do not make money touring – don’t let anyone tell you this because it’s bollocks. Touring is an arduous and expensive business for virtually all bands, so don’t let anyone tell you it will make up for lost album sales because it won’t (touring, I mean, not just playing live, which is a different story).

So at some point, after you’ve raised all the publicity you can and received all the critical acclaim you can muster, you have to decide that some things need to be paid for, but what are they? As Ruth says, it makes sense to allow blogs to talk about things because I would agree that the word of mouth is important, and it can even be argued that it makes sense to allow some file-sharing as well, because it too spreads the word far and wide. But where does the money come from? Ultimately, if you are to avoid having great musicians sweating away at shitty jobs, they need to be paid. Money needs to be coming into the system from somewhere, and at the moment I really don’t see where that is coming from.

I think that trying to drive traffic, as Kruger have done, by trying to insist on exclusivity or trying to restrict or own dialogue as many are trying to do in the internet age, is just not the way to do it. I can see their point of view, in the same way I think I would be justified in trying to make the Toad Sessions exclusive, but I still pretty much think it’s the wrong approach. Then again, I am not paying my bills with this.

At the moment though I think the best plan is not to worry about that sort of thing: build an audience, build a fan base, get out there and get some loyal listeners and trust that somewhere, somehow, this will end up being something that will create its own opportunities. How the fuck you manage this as a band without losing all faith in the dream is beyond me though. How and when do you put your foot down and say ‘No, not this time. Now you need to put your hands in your pockets, people.’ I just don’t think anyone has a good answer to this question at the moment.

These two songs come from the brilliant Velvet Never Dries, which can be purchased from the Modernaire MySpace page here.

Modernaire – Bloodshed in the Woodshed One of my favourite songs of the year, this one.
Modernaire – Rain

And here is Hannah and Ruth’s other band, the wonderful Moulettes. Do me a favour and buy something from both bands because it’s not expensive, and I really appreciate them making their contribution to this page and being so patient with my nonsense. And, of course, they’re both fucking brilliant.

The Moulettes – Pirate Song

I got an email a couple of days ago from Ruth. You may not think you know who Ruth is, but I bet you do really: she is in two of my favourite recent discoveries, The Moulettes and Modernaire. In fact, the only reason I know about Modernaire in the first place is because they appear on the Moulettes MySpace page. Well Ruth and Hannah were so nice to me when I first wrote about The Moulettes that when something of a spat developed over the concept of ‘Internet Exclusivity’ after I was asked to take some Modernaire songs down I felt bloody awful about it. Anyhow, she emailed to say the following:

I don’t understand what you meant by internet exclusivity being a silly thing, can you explain? I didn’t know we were exclusive.

So thought I’d explain in the form of a post and give them the chance to respond as well, so we get to hear their side of it.  I might even ask a couple of other music industry folk I know to chip in, just to try and get a full picture of the dilemma facing small record labels and bands in the shifting sands that today’s record industry has become.

Well quite simply I meant two very basic things: firstly that internet exclusivity is, on a practical level, impossible; and secondly that internet exclusivity and the policing thereof is actively harmful to a band in the early stages of gaining an audience.

In terms of practicality, a label, manager or band asking a blog to take a couple of songs down is pointless.  Music piracy does not get spread far and wide by mp3 blogs to anything like the extent it does in the more efficient channels of P2P and BitTorrent.  Encrypted Torrents are massively on the increase ever since ISPs threatened to start snooping on what is essentially people’s private communication, so there is no real end in sight for this  particular problem.  And for every blog like my own that will take things down without an argument, there are a dozen who will not do so.  Once something is out there, it is out there.  Trying to stop it is utterly futile; all you end up doing is alienating the more cooperative sites and wasting massive amounts of your own time.

Why alienating?  Well because we really do think we are helping and having that thrown back in your face when you are genuinely being sincere and genuinely think that what you are doing is in the best interests of the band is depressing.  A quick look at the Hype Machine page for Modernaire will show you that they are hardly a household name at this stage, although they have had some good reaction from the mainstream press, so I was frankly amazed that anyone managing a band at this sort of embryonic stage of their career would react in that sort of a way.

Any sort of publicity at this stage of a band’s career is like oxygen – it’s crucial, and at this sort of early stage doing anything to hinder it is just crazy, if you ask me.  More than anything else at this point I would have thought that a band needs to be known and, almost as importantly, to be known of.  People need to have heard the name as much as possible and mp3 blogs and The Hype Machine can be an incredibly powerful way of achieving that.  The Hype Machine has an audience of millions and is easy to browse and search.  Because it indexes mp3s, without that mp3 you are denying access to that entire audience which, given the fact that the mp3 is almost certainly already out there on the P2P networks anyway, seems daft.

The dilemma for bands is obvious enough.  Especially if you are a newish band, there is a limited amount of material for which you can actually charge; in some cases only a couple of finished songs.  So if these are already ‘out there’ then how the hell can you hope to make any money off anything?  This is a genuine dilemma and I don’t really think anyone knows the answers at the moment.

My personal (and highly debatable) position on it is this: people buying stuff at this stage of a band’s career are collectors and fans who are actually looking to spend the money.  I think, I am fairly confident anyway, that they are very likely to buy it anyway.  There is a well-established economic model for this: they are the Early Adopters.  People actively looking to avoid spending anything will just get it from a torrent site anyway, not from a blog – I just don’t think you’re costing yourself anything by allowing that mp3 to sit on a blog page, complete with band bio, a bit of personal feedback and links to your site, your tour or your MySpace page.

It’s like radio play, just the fact that the mp3 is downloadable confuses everyone, but basically mp3 blogs are like 21st Century radio stations.  Even the big labels know nowadays that they are part of your marketing strategy and a crucial avenue for getting your music out to people.  Even at my level I get 36 000 views per month – about half the sales of the big music magazines – and it’s growing.

Licensing exists in the first place because when recorded music was invented there was outrage amongst musicians that it would kill music.  A bit like home taping.  A bit like teh internetz.  Something has always been killing music.  So licensing was invented to ensure that even when they themselves weren’t playing it, artists still benefited financially from having their music played on the radio or manufactured on record.  Should mp3 blogs pay royalties if that’s the game they want to play?  Yes, I suppose so, although blanket fees would be insane.  The vast majority of mp3 blogs are amateur and make no profit, so it would have to be a ‘percentage of income’ deal and the amount of income earned for artists would be negligible for the time being, although there’s no reason that won’t change in the future.  And bear in mind that money will overwhelmingly go to the likes of EMI and Warners, and won’t support the lesser-known bands we are trying to support, so it’s hardly a great solution.

The big problem with this situation is that at the moment the only real currency in the internet game for the likes of me is pageviews.  In forcing unworkable, restrictive conditions on bands like ‘internet exclusivity’ my guess, although I don’t claim to know, is that the label in question wants to claim audience.  It wants to drive people to their site and effectively own a crucial portion of the internet conversation about the band.  I can see their point: if they can’t necessarily guarantee money back for their investment from sales, it makes sense to think about other forms of capital they can accumulate instead.

Ultimately though, I think it’s misguided.  The internet doesn’t work well under those kind of conditions.  If I recommend someone click on a link to go to an external page where they can look around and download some mp3s they haven’t heard, the chances of them doing that are very small, compared to playing direct from the page.  People just can’t be arsed, most of the time.  The world of small music websites works best when people are more cooperative because it spreads goodwill.  Fail to spread goodwill and people slowly stop wanting to interact with you.  I’ve seen this myself: as I put more and more work into this site, I am finding less and less time to browse other people’s pages and chat about their choices.  The result: my audience may be growing, but I am getting fewer comments from other bloggers, and probably fewer links too.  To keep them onside I have to help make their enterprises better, show that I’m on their side rather than just my own, and make a contribution.

There will come a point where you have a following, a critical mass, and an established audience.  Then having anything and everything available for nothing probably does eat into what you’ll sell, to some extent.  I am not entirely convinced by that argument, but I definitely think it has some validity.  But in the early days you want to encourage the flow of chatter as much as you possibly can and I think that anything that shuts it down is just suicidal.  It’s dubious enough to state that it’s in the interests of the label, although I can see how they would think it would be, but it is categorically not in the interests of the band.

I could be wrong, but I think that’s how it works.  And for all this sounds like the rant of a selfish arse who just wants his own way, it isn’t.  I genuinely love both of these groups and I really want them to do well, I am just trying to figure out what I think the best way is to achieve that.  That’s why I want them to respond.  Their take on all this will be different, as would a label’s, and I think the best way we can find a solution to this at the moment is to try and really understand the dilemma as viewed through the eyes of the other party.  There are plenty of blogs out there slapping one another on the back and insisting that their way is the best and only way.  I don’t think that.  I have my views, of course I do, but if bands and labels and retailers and distributors want to tell me how and why I am wrong then I really want to know.  I may still disagree, but hearing each other out is going to be far more productive way of getting it straight.  And ultimately, as I said at the beginning, I want to help.  I actually do not want to be seen as a hindrance or a parasite by the music industry because I love music, and I really do want to make a positive contribution.  Most of us, especially at this level, genuinely do.

R.E.M. – What if We Give it Away
Pete Wylie – Stay Free
Sleeper – Sale of the Century

Bill has very kindly allowed me back on Blogfresh to talk about Modernaire and the whole intellectual property issue.  After seeing the enormous length to which that particular discussion unravelled I think Bill was placing enormous confidence in his editing abilities, to be able to get the inevitable rant down to a couple of minutes worth of intro.

It also gave me a chance to big up Modernaire again, after the slightly spiteful nonsense that ensued on that particular post.  I felt bad about that because I really like the band and I never really intended to slag them off personally.  To reiterate: they are an excellent group, they really should go places, and I think they are ace.  But also, internet exclusivity as a concept is just silly, and that particular policy is not only futile but potentially quite damaging to the initial word-spreading that they currently need.  Still, good luck to ‘em and let this be the last of it.

The Delgados – Accused of Stealing

There’s only time for a real quickie this week as I am working my hairy little buttocks off on the Broken Records stuff at the moment.  Still, in your insatiable thirst for pointless, self-indulgent rambling I was sure you’d want to listen to something splendid in the meantime.

There’s no underlying theme to anything either I’m afraid, just me rattling on about some current and very interesting music, as well as a couple of confessions so shocking you may never come back here again.  Looking at the playlist, I’m sure you can guess which ones they are.

So good luck with this, and I am already looking forward to the next one.

Toadcast #25 – The Quickcast[audio http://media.libsyn.com/media/songbytoad/ToadcastNo25.mp3]

01.  The Futureheads – Broke Up the Time (02.02)
02. Tapes ‘n’ Tapes – Hang Them All (05.05)
03. Meursault – Pissing on Bonfires/Kissing With Tongues(13.21)
04. The Byrons – Azerbaijan (19.13)
05. The Fire Engines – Candyskin (26.04)
06. The Close Lobsters – Firestation Towers (28.53)
07. Mighty Mighty – Law (34.21)
08. Kim Carnes – When I’m Away From You (41.14)
09. Meat Loaf – Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth (44.32)
10. Dirty Summer – War is Bad, Bono is Great (50.02)
11. The Low Lows – Dear Flies Love Spider (53.40)
12. Sargasso Trio – It’s Hot in Hell (58.32)
13. The Extraordinaires – High Five the Cactus (63.11)
14. Modernaire – Distraction (69.40)
15. The Indelicates – Point Me to the West (75.47)
16. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – Night of the Lotus Eaters(83.47)

Yes, you did read that correctly.  Meat Loaf.  Fuck off.